In the Social Media Monitoring Part1 of Fitbit Charge 2 Marketing Campaign, we got some detailed information about both Fitbit and Fitbit Charge 2. Fitbit Charge 2, which was released on August 29, 2016, is a wireless and wearable technology devices design for daily activities tracking and relative data measuring. Considering that Fitbit Charge 2 is already launched and being used by lots of customers, it is worth comparing it with Garmin Vivosmart HR+, a fitness tracking device which was released on May 16, 2016.
Garmin is an American multinational technology company that produces professional aviation and marine devices by using the Global Positioning System for navigational assistance. The product Garmin launched in May last year was Garmin Vivosmart HR+, an activity tracker with a lot of similarities to Fitbit Charge 2.
It has many of the same features with Fitbit Charge 2, such as all-day activity tracking, sleep tracking, moving notification and heart rate monitoring. It can also measure data like steps taken, distance traveled, floors climbed, calories burned, heart rate, active minutes and sleep quality.
Garmin Vivosmart HR+ users can link it with a specific mobile app, monitor their daily active tracking records and share them to their social accounts, just like what Fitbit Charge 2 users do. However, different from Fitbit Charge 2, Garmin Vivosmart HR+ offers some functions that Fitbit Charge 2 doesn’t have, such as music control, weather report, and notifications from other third-party social apps.
What is more, Garmin Vivosmart HR+ is water resistant to about 50 meters while Fitbit Charge 2 is not waterproof, although the lack of a swimming mode may bring a little disappointment.
Considering all the extra functions that Garmin Vivosmart HR+ has while Fitbit Charge 2 doesn’t, it is reasonable that Garmin Vivosmart HR+ is more expensive than Fitbit Charge 2. On the Amazon, the prime price of Garmin Vivosmart HR+ is $169.99 while Fitbit Charge 2 is $148.95.
On the other hand, Fitbit Charge 2 also has some advantages that Garmin Vivosmart HR+ doesn’t have, such as the Guided Breathing function, which offers personalized breathing sessions according to your heart rate. Unlike Fitbit Charge 2, Garmin Vivosmart HR+ doesn’t provide replaceable colorful bands. Fitbit Charge 2 users can change their bands according to their taste easily. However, if you want to change your Garmin Vivosmart HR+ band, you have to buy an extra replacement tool, including screwdrivers, screws and an additional replacement band, which means you have to pay more money than Fitbit Charge 2 users.
Facebook
As of March 22, 2017, the Garmin Facebook homepage achieved 1,490,325 followers, and 1,499,364 users had liked this page. At the same time, the Fitbit Facebook homepage got 1,905,397 followers, and 1,926,143 likes. It seems that Fitbit wins in this “Facebook Followers Competition”. But wait! What will happen if we take a look at their community homepage on Facebook? Well, the Fitbit Community Facebook homepage got only 2,541 followers and 2,476 likes. How about Garmin? To my surprise, Garmin Outdoor, the community Facebook homepage of Garmin, achieved 85,669 followers and 86,997 likes.
Why there is such a big difference? First of all, their update frequency is not the same. On their homepages, we can see that Garmin Outdoor almost post every day while the latest post of Fitbit Community was on March 16, six days ago. Frequent updates make Garmin Outdoor more accessible and attractive on Facebook and draw more attention of other Facebook users. Besides, Garmin tries to interact more with the users on Facebook.
By looking at the Facebook homepage of both Fitbit and Garmin, we can see that both Garmin and Fitbit are doing the same thing in their everyday posts, sharing scientific information about fitness, such as sport tips and healthy meal plans, and offering answers to users who had questions or met problems of their products as soon as possible. However, in addition of these, Garmin also shares product discount information on its Facebook homepage. When some of its products were on sale, they will post relative information on its Facebook homepage, which may attract more potential customers. Garmin also tries to encourage its users to share their personal reviews and users’ experience on Facebook.
Just in yesterday, March 21, 2017, Garmin posted “Has your Garmin changed your life?” on its Facebook homepage to encourage users to share their stories with Garmin products on its official website. All these interactions with users may keep Garmin active on Facebook and attract more customers.
What is more important is, on Facebook, Garmin also shares the posts from its community homepage Garmin Outdoor. Considering that Garmin's Facebook homepage has a lot of followers, this action can not only bring more attention to Garmin Outdoor's Facebook homepage but also can help Garmin to keep active in people's sights.
On the contrary, Fitbit rarely shares contents of its Facebook community homepage, which may make Fitbit Community to be forgotten by the user easily. If Fitbit wants its Facebook community homepage to become as popular as Garmin, maybe it should interact more with its Facebook communities.
Youtube
To get a brief view of their product, the Garmin official Youtube account also uploaded an introducing video of Garmin Vivosmart HR+ in June 2016. Until now, this video was viewed by 15,322 people, while the introducing video of Fitbit Charge 2 had been viewed by 2,252,995 times. It seems that Fitbit Charge 2 drew more attention than Garmin Vivosmart HR+ on Youtube.
Considering this video has already closed its comment function, just the same thing what Fitbit did, we are not able to know the directly feeling that people have about this video. But there are also more than four thousands of Garmin Vivosmart HR+ reviews on Youtube. Just like people who have interested in Fitbit Charge 2, users who attracted by Garmin Vivosmart HR+ keep asking questions by leaving comments for these review videos, trying to get more detailed information about this product from other users’ experience.
Garmin Twitter homepage has 13.2 million followers while Fitbit Twitter homepage has 31.8 million.Technologically, what Garmin and Fitbit posted on Twitter are almost the same things they posted on their Facebook page. Both of them post health tips every day. In the meantime, Garmin Twitter homepage also shares discount information about their products on Twitter. It seems that Garmin is not only trying to help you keep healthy but also wants to help you to save money.
Unlike Fitbit Charge 2 users, instead of sharing their personal daily activities’ record and the badges they gained on the apps, Garmin Vivosmart HR+ users usually share introducing information and personal reviews of this product on Twitter, which may help others to get more detailed information about it.
Amazon
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| The Amazon Review f Fitbit Charge 2 |
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| The Amazon Review of Garmin Vivosmart HR + |
As of March 22, 2017, based on 6,936 submissions, Fitbit Charge 2 had an average of 4.3 out of 5 stars as well as 996 answered questions. In the same time, Garmin Vivosmart HR+ had a 3.8-star average from 498 submissions, with 286 answered questions. It seems that people prefer to ask questions before they make their decisions. After bought these products, they tend to leave their comments and provide feedback to others.
On amazon, there is a label said that Fitbit Charge 2 is the “Amazon’s Choice”, which means is highly recommend, well-price product. For Garmin Vivosmart HR+, it was called as the best Fitness Tracker of the Year at the Wearable Tech Awards 2016. Both of these two products won a highly rating online. So which one should you choose to buy? On Amazon, some customers already posted a brief analysis based on their own experience. According to these feedbacks, for people who want a product that offers the most at the best price, Fitbit Charge 2 is their choice to be. For customers who prefer to a wireless, waterproof wearable device with more functions, and also don’t care much about the price, they’d better choose a Garmin Vivosmart HR+.
According to the Google Trends data from March 22, 2016, to March 22, 2017, I found that people’s interests of both Fitbit Charge 2 and Garmin Vivosmart HR+ increased when shopping season came. The two big peaks in this one-year period data both appeared at the time people were busy on shopping. One of the big peaks appears from November 20 to November 26, 2016, which is also known as the Black Friday period. Another big peak appears around Christmas seasons, from December 25 to December 31, 2016. Considering that people shopping a lot because these two time periods are the sale of goods, there’s no doubt that these two products drew people’s attention at that time. After the New Year of 2017, people's interests on both Fitbit Charge 2 and Garmin Vivosmart HR+ began to decrease. It is also reasonable after most people got their presents after shopping season.
Like Fitbit Charge 2, Garmin Vivosmart HR+ also attracted the attention of overseas users. Most of the search results come from English-speaking countries, such as Australia and Canada. Western European users also expressed their interests in Garmin Vivosmart HR+.
Blogspot Blog Search is a searching engine designed by Google to help users search all the relative blogs which contain the target keywords. According to the results given by Blogspot Blog Search, I found most relative blogs about both Fitbit Charge 2 and Garmin Vivosmart HR+ were product recommendation and reviews. It seems that people really have a strong attention to share their using experience of their fitness tracking device online, and there are also lots of people tend to get more detailed information from these reviews and feedbacks. Perhaps wearable device company such as Fitbit could better introduce itself by making use of these reviews and feedbacks.
Social Mention
Here is just a reminder of what these four aspects stand for:
Strength--is the likelihood that your brand is being discussed on social media.
Sentiment—is the ratio of positive to negative mentions.
Passion—is the likelihood that the people talking about our brand will do so repeatedly.
Reach—is the range of influence, or the number of unique authors mentioning your brand divided by the total number of mentions.
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| The Social Mention Result of Fitbit Charge 2 |
From the results, it seems that Fitbit Charge 2 gets more chance that is being discussed online than Garmin Vivosmart HR+. Both of these two products got positive comments more than negative ones, while the relevant information of them is easy to be reached. However, people online seems to have more interests in Garmin Vivosmart HR+ than Fitbit Charge 2. Maybe this result was relative to Garmin’s social media posting strategies.
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| The Social Mention Result of Gramin Vivosmart HR+ |
SWOT Analyze
Strength
--Well-known and Highly-recommended Product
--Returning Customers
--Quick Response Time on Facebook
--Connection with Smartphone Apps
--Social Media Data Sharing Function
Opportunities
--Offer waterproof figures
--Expand use of reviews from social media accounts
--Expand international markets
Weakness
--Lack of interact with online communities
--Technological issues of Product use
--Limited use of Youtube beyond advertisements
Threats
-- New technology development
--New products brought challenge to old products
--Possibility of increasing price
Suggestions
The campaign of Fitbit Charge 2 seems to be successful, but there is still something that needs to be improved. According to all the data above, here are some suggestions that may help.
1. Interact more with online communities
It is obviously that Fitbit didn’t make fully use of its online communities as Garmin did. The online community may not only maintain focuses on the brand for existing users but also attract more potential customers. Fitbit should pay more attention to the update posts of its online community and share some interesting posts from it in order to keep it accessible.
2. Encourage users to share their using experience
Research results showed that instead of getting detailed information from the official, customers prefer to know more from other users’ personal using experience and reviews. Fitbit could encourage its customers to share relative stories or reviews of their own Fitbit products, which may help others to gain more information about both the product and what change it would make in users’ lives.
3. Sharing discount information on social networking sites
According to the data above, people’s interests of Fitbit products increased a lot during shopping seasons. For Fitbit, it would be helpful to post discount information of their products online at that time. On the one hand, it may bring more potential customers. On the other hand, it also shows that Fitbit cares about their customers.
4. Hold “Free-Sample Review Activity”
This is what I mentioned in the social media monitoring part 1 before. After purchased Fitbit products, most users still have questions during their using process. From my point of view, according to this situation, Fitbit could hold a “Free-Sample Review Activity” when they released a new product, which is very popular now in China. Considering that Fitbit has lots of followers in its social networking homepages, once Fitbit released a new product, it can post relative information on their social networking sites. And then they announce that people who share this post may get a chance to have a free sample of this latest product. Then they choose a certain amount of luck dogs from people who share this post. Those lucky users may get a chance to use a free sample for a certain time. But after using, they need to write a detailed review then post it on social networking sites. By doing this, for Fitbit, they may get more useful feedbacks to help them improve their products. For customers, they have a chance to try latest products. For other users, they have more opportunities to get more detailed information. It is a win-win method.
Although Fitbit Charge 2 got highly rating online and its campaign seemed to be successful, it still needs to be improved. Research showed that people’s interests of this product usually increase when shopping season comes. Besides, people try to get more detailed information from other users’ reviews and using experience. Compared to Garmin, in order to gain more potential customers, Fitbit should interact more with its online communities, encourage its followers to share their reviews. Sharing discount information on social networking sites when shopping seasons come may also be helpful. If possible, Fitbit could hold a "Free-Sample Review Activity" to gain more attention and get more useful feedbacks as well.
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